Cancer

11:22:00 AM

It was a day decorated by
the gods themselves. The sun sported a deep red blush. The sky
dazzled around it in an impeccable gradient, with strokes of cirrus
painted on. The wind, applauded by the rustling leaves, whistled the
finest tunes and the petrichor from the previous night still pervaded
the air. A poet and their pen would have relished the impression.
Sadly, Shay was neither. Her eyes did wander to the heavens every
once in a while, but the object of the glances was hardly a piece of
natural art: Amid the picturesque background floated, as if by magic,
the Cube.

“Ahem...”, coughed
one of the nameless faces surrounding her for the third time, trying
its best (and failing rather miserably) to keep her attention. Once
again Shay was jolted out of her trance, and once again her attention
refocused onto her interviewer. Shay wasn't particularly fond of
daydreaming. In fact, she was rather averse to it. She considered
herself to be a woman of action, and she was hardly alone with this
impression. And yet, the almost motherly pride that every glance of
the Cube brought to her was too tempting, even for her. Of course,
the fact that she had little respect for interviews such as these
didn't help either. Her eyes lazily shifted back to the scrawny,
uninteresting figure in front of her and the unmistakable air of
corporate pompousness that the sight carried with it made her cringe.
Her gaze finally settled upon the bionic arm holding the expecting
microphone, it being perhaps the only thing in this whole affair that
piqued her interest in the slightest. “Would you mind giving our
subscribers a watered down version of how it actually works?...”
The same old question echoed yet again. Shay sighed internally as her
lips automatically recited a well rehearsed answer for the umpteenth
time.

The ill-named contraption
in question was a remarkable ring of rather unremarkable proportions.
A trespassing hippy (assuming they managed to dodge the infinite
stream of bullets greeting them) would have mistaken it for a piece
of Third Renaissance “art”, perhaps deriving a deep existential
meaning of the hollow shape. Perhaps not. But the unassuming
appearance hardly betrayed the fact that the thingamajig represented
the epitome of human ingenuity. It had taken an immeasurable amount
of human genius distilled over a millennium to birth that curious
structure. The mismatching name, of course, was rumoured to be an
artefact of some ancient Newtonian equations that predicted a cube
instead of a ring. Little did they know that the engineers came up
with it on one of the nights when their blood had more alcohol than
glucose. Many a sly smile had been exchanged over this cute little
in-joke.

It had all begun about a
millennium before the birth of Shay Snow, with a most outrageous
proposal by a little known Mexican physicist. The world had laughed,
or at least sniggered, when Miguel Alcubierre had first suggested the
possibility of faster-than-light travel without violating General
Relativity. Although the mathematics presented was viable, the metric
tensor so obtained was quickly discarded by the traditionalists as a
mere mathematical artefact with no physical interpretation. With the
prevalent technology handicapping any experimental verification for
centuries, the idea quickly receded into the background, preserved
only as a curiosity in university textbooks on geometric topology.

Fast-forward about a
thousand years, and you find the Earth way past her final breaths.
After all, a finite ball of dirt could cater to only so many at once.
It wasn't a question of efficiency either. Humans excelled in that
department. The most uninhabitable corners of the globe had been
terraformed to serve their needs: The Antarctic was bedizened in lush
green and the finest loam covered the entire Sahara. And yet, in the
grand scheme of things, terraformation was but an ephemeral solution;
one final hooray before the end. The sole long-term solution, of
course, was obvious. New Earths were needed.

Obvious as it was, it
took a while for the realisation to percolate into the general human
outlook. Fortunately, finding candidate planets for terraformation
was not that difficult. Getting to them in a viable amount of time,
however, was an entirely different story. And so the most brilliant
minds of multiple generations set out to find a solution and find a
solution they did, in some ancient books on geometric topology: the
Alcubierre Warp Drive was born. A large scale implementation,
however, was still far away. Unsurprisingly, the energy requirements
were huge at any significant scale. And yet again, the human
ingenuity was tested to its limit. And yet again, the humans won.
Seven centuries worth of tweaking the shape of the warp bubble
brought down the required energy from a few solar masses to a few
kilograms. Shay herself had a relatively minor (although vital) role
in this. However, it was under her leadership that the centuries of
work culminated in the form of the Cube. It was, dare she say it, her
secret guilt. But it was all for the greater good and that was
good enough for her.

Hearing her name called
out from the podium broke her out of her reverie. The countdown was
about to begin. She stole a glance at the Cube one more time and then
shifted her gaze to the terrapods, buzzing and ready for launch. An
uncountable number of cameras followed. “T minus 16...” it began.

Light years away, from the
other side of the event horizon of one of the countless insignificant
black holes, a Watcher peered, observing its favourite universe. A slight artefact in the radiation emitted from the singularity betrayed the sorrow that engulfed it. The cancer had metastasised.

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Welcome to the Polyart Factory.

We are not professional artists. But it is our belief that regardless of the medium of expression, it is the same creative process that underlies the various forms of art. Join us as we explore music composition, creative writing, visual arts, and more.